Overview

Luckenbooth is an audacious, many-voiced gothic that binds the fates of Edinburgh’s residents to one notorious address: 10 Luckenbooth Close. Across the twentieth century—and beyond—a curse threads through the building, seeping into the lives of a shifting cast whose stories interlock like crooked floorboards. The result is a dark, dazzling tapestry of the city’s hidden heart.

Writing & Atmosphere

Fagan’s prose has bite and music—lyrical one moment, knife-clean the next. She conjures rooms steeped in damp and memory, stairwells that remember footsteps, and a city that feels both bodily and mythic. Chapters flicker between eras with cinematic confidence, and motifs—antlers, coins, blood, the sea—recur like charms pinned to a jacket.

The gothic here is never mere costume: it’s a pressure system. Violence, poverty, and superstition weather the characters like stone in rain, while the building itself becomes a sentient witness, holding grief and tenderness in its joists.

Characters

From the devil’s daughter who sets the curse, to bohemians, sex workers, queer lovers, and those society overlooks—voices arrive vivid and defiant. Fagan gives each narrator a distinct timbre; even in brief chapters, lives flare with specificity. The cumulative effect is choral: a tenement of souls singing through time.

Themes

Curses and hauntings become lenses for inheritance—of trauma, of city myth, of the bodies we’re born into. The novel reckons with misogyny, class, and the policing of desire, while insisting on connection and chosen kin. Memory is architecture here: who built it, who gets locked out, and who learns the secret doors.

What Worked

• Atmosphere for days: Edinburgh rendered as living folklore.
• Polyphonic structure: short, electric chapters that click together.
• Bold imagery: recurring symbols that deepen resonance rather than decorate.
• Human core: tenderness and rage held in the same palm.

Minor Quibbles

• The kaleidoscopic cast can disorient if you prefer a single through-line.
• Some threads close abruptly—fitting the curse’s logic, but leaving edges purposefully ragged.

Final Thoughts

Fierce, eerie, and gloriously alive, Luckenbooth turns a tenement into a mythic engine—grinding history into song. Fagan’s novel is a love letter to the unsung and a spell for anyone who’s ever felt a building watch them back.

Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)